May 31st, 2011

[UPDATE 5/31/11 at 11:50 PM: The glitch has been corrected, so the problem should have disappeared. It took quite a bit of doing!]

[NOTE: This post has been bumped up for greater visibility. New posts can be found below.]

I will try to fix this ASAP. But I just noticed that there’s a glitch if you click on the comments tabs or the permalinks here. For some reason a long string of extra stuff has been added to the URLs, and when you click on either the comments tab or the permalink for each post, you get a message that reads:

400 Bad Request—Invalid request.

For example, if you click on the comments tab for the top post on May 30, 2011, and then look at the address bar, it will say:

This of course is incorrect. But if you delete everything between the slash after the last word of the title of the post (in this case it would be patriotism/) and the phrase at the end (#comments) you will get the following, and it should take you to the right place:

It’s not that hard to do, but it’s still a pain in the neck. But as I said, I’ll be working on fixing it.

[UPDATE 5/31/11 1:10 PM: Still working on it. It's a bit complicated and might not be resolved for a day or so, so please bear with me till then and work around it by following the above instructions. Sorry for the problem, but it almost certainly will be fixed pretty soon. I will keep you updated.]

From its behavior I’m guessing that WordPress appends the “/#comment” to end end of the Permalink, and that where things are going to Hell is the creation of said Permalink (by the addition of that string of garbage).

Does Worpress have any ideas, or do they have perhaps ONE Lone Ranger trying to deal with 500 indians at the same time.

Meanwhile, there were numerous other sites where I didn’t have any problems.

At Ace of Spades I get a message saying my IP address had been banned. At all the others, my comments simply disappeared. I get a “duplicate post detected” message if I try again.

I e-mailed Neo and she found my missing comments in her spam filter. She set them free and things are back to normal now. (I did thank you in the comments, Neo, in case you didn’t see it; although I suppose I should have sent an e-mail thanking you.)

I e-mailed Rand Simberg at TTM, but he didn’t find my comments in his spam filter, and doesn’t know what else to do.

I sent e-mails to Ace and PJM but never heard back.

I never sent an e-mail to RightNetwork, but I tried a test message last weekend and it worked.

I’ve also gotten three e-mails from Comcast telling me that my computer may be infected with “bots” and to click on their security link. I ignored the first two, but finally clicked on it the third time since the e-mails looked legit and I was having the aforementioned problems. I ended up downloading a free version of Norton’s security suite from Comcast’s site. I ran the system scan but it didn’t turn up anything.

Meanwhile, there’s been some Mac malware going around. Just within the past few days (and before I downloaded the Norton software) I’ve had a dialogue box pop up several times telling me that my computer is infected and to click on it. It looked suspicious as hell, so I force quit Safari instead. My instincts were correct, since that turned out to be exactly what Apple recommends doing. They’ll soon put out a security update to deal with it.

This afternoon I saw a thread at Ace of Spades about malware that is apparently being transmitted through some of the ads on the site. Some of the commenters described having serious problems with it.

Not on topic, but I wanted to express my gratitude for your recommendation to read Chamber’s WITNESS.

I clicked on your link and bought it from Amazon. When it arrived I picked it up and couldn’t put it down.

His account is superbly written and riveting.

Without your recommendation, it is likely I would never have read it. I realize now that I was still harboring some of the negative impressions of Whitaker Chambers that I must have picked up from the media when–long ago–I still thought they attempted to be honest.

After I read your own absorbing account of your evolution, your recommendation was enough in itself to overcome my lingering prejudice against Chambers.

Just so you know, I tried about three or four times during the day to click on one of the “comment” links, and it was completely dead. The address bar didn’t change from neoneocon.com.

I noticed a message in the lower left corner of my screen. I didn’t think to write it down, but I think it said “Page Error”.

Anyway, glad you got things back to normal.

rickl: A couple of months ago my computer caught some sort of virus when I clicked through a Powerline blog post that linked to an aticle at David Horowitz’s FrontPage blog. The Powerline link took me directly to the FrontPage article, and I didn’t click on anything at FrontPage (unless I did so unwittingly). Anyway, a dialogue box suddenly appeared saying my computer was infected with multiple viruses and it urged me to click through to start a scan. I was very suspicious and did not click through. I shut my system down instead. Then when I turned it back on, about half way through the boot cycle that dialgue box appeared again and it would not allow my computer to complete the entire reboot. It just froze. I tried several more times, but the sytem was locked. I gave up and bought a new coputer (my old one was about 5 years old, so I was due). But it was pretty depressing to know I’m paying for McAfee, Webroot’s Spy Sweeper, and whatever protection Windows XP had built into it, and the virus still got through and copletely disabled my computer.

BTW I just had the misfortune to see Black Swan. Where is Mystery Science Theater 3000 when you need them. I spent the picture wondering why Portman didn’t do herself a big favor and buy herself a hamburger.

About Me

Previously a lifelong Democrat, born in New York and living in New England, surrounded by liberals on all sides, I've found myself slowly but surely leaving the fold and becoming that dread thing: a neocon. Read More >>